James Flynn points out a fascinating dynamic at TED2013, that we appear to be getting smarter. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

In the 1980s, psychologist James Flynn discovered that, over the past century, our average IQ has increased dramatically. The difference, in fact, is so stark that the phenomenon garnered its own name: the Flynn effect.

In today’s talk, Why our IQ levels are higher than our grandparents’, given at TED2013, Flynn explains that if you scored people a century ago against today’s norms, they’d have an IQ of 70, while if you score us against their norms, we’d have an average IQ of 130. In the years since his original discovery, Flynn has investigated just what this evolution is all about. Hint: our ancestors weren’t on the verge of mental retardation, nor are we all intellectually gifted.

James Flynn: Why our IQ levels are higher than our grandparents'
Flynn argues that the effect comes down to three types of thinking we currently practice that we didn’t a century ago: “classification, using logic on abstractions, taking the hypothetical seriously,” as he puts it. In other words, kids are tested in school on their ability not just to recite facts, but to apply logic to abstract scenarios. These types of thinking are also demanded by our jobs, as cognitively demanding professions have risen in popularity and importance. “Some of the habits of mind that we have developed over the twentieth century have paid off in unexpected areas,” he says.

Flynn delves into this dramatic change in his book, Are We Getting Smarter?, which you should definitely pick up if you’re interested in this subject. Below, some more fascinating reading on Flynn’s work.

In an interview last December with Smithsonian.com, Flynn presented some surprising nuggets he’d come across in his research. He noted that the gap between adults’ vocabularies and their children’s is increasing. Meanwhile, he also pointed out that the word “teenager” didn’t exist in 1950. Finally, a rather depressing thought: “The brighter you are, the quicker after the age of 65 you have a downward curve for your analytic abilities. For a bright person, you go downhill faster than an average person.”.

Flynn also spoke with Scientific Americanabout his latest book and findings, and he beautifully explained the evolution of our mindset: “We have no idea of the gulf that separates our mind from people 100 years ago in America. We’ve put on scientific spectacles and they had on utilitarian spectacles. They were splitters. If you’re making use of the environment for advantage, you distinguish things. This animal leaves this track. This dog is good for hunting and that one isn’t. We’re lumpers; we’re used to thinking that you classify the world as a prerequisite to understanding it, and we’re highly willing to use logic on the abstract.”.

In Flynn’s original 1984 article, “The Mean IQ of Americans: Massive Gains 1932 to 1978,” he argued that, “The period in question shows the radical malleability of IQ during a time of normal environmental change; other times and other trends cannot erase that fact.”.

A 2005 piece in Wired told the story of Flynn’s discovery, which flowered from a combination of happenstance, a keen eye and dogged data collection..

The Flynn effect got the Malcolm Gladwell treatment in a 2007 New Yorker piece following the publication of Flynn’s What Is Intelligence? “An I.Q., in other words, measures not so much how smart we are as how modern we are,” Gladwell wrote. “This is a critical distinction.”.

And the Flynn effect got the James Flynn treatment in a September 2012 Wall Street Journal essay. Here, Flynn gave a series of sample test questions to demonstrate our minds’ evolution:

1. [square] / [square] / [triangle]. 2. [circle] / [circle] / [blank]. In this question, the relationship is conveyed by shapes, not concrete objects. By 1960, many could choose semicircle as the answer: Just as the square is halved into a triangle, so the circle should be halved.

1. * / & / ?. 2. M / B / [blank]. In this question, the relationship is simply that the symbols have nothing in common except that they are the same kind of symbol. That “relationship” transcends the literal appearance of the symbols themselves. By 2010, many could choose “any letter other than M or B” from the list as the answer..

In a largely positive Guardian review of Flynn’s most recent book, the writer ended by lamenting Flynn’s discovery of the “Bright Tax” (see #1, above): “In fact, this reviewer is so depressed by Professor Flynn’s musing about ageing that he has resolved to devote all his remaining analytical capabilities to designing a rocket-powered stair-lift. The aim: to get to the top before he has forgotten what he was coming upstairs for.”

Jim Flynn is an expert in intelligence famous for his research on the Flynn effect, the phenomenon that humanity’s IQ has been dramatically increasing since the 1930s. He opens Session 11 today on the last day of TED2013 to help answer the question, “Who are we?”

During the 21st century, our minds have altered, he begins. At the beginning of the century, people were confronted with a concrete world, and their primary interest in dealing with it was to analyze how much it would benefit them. In today’s world we confront a complex world with new habits of mind: classification and abstraction. We clothe the concrete world, trying to make it logical and consistent. We ask not just about the concrete but the hypothetical: what might be, and not just what is.

Today the line for giftedness is an IQ of 130. If you scored people a century ago against modern norms, they would have an IQ of 70. That is the line for mental retardation today. What can account for this?

Imagine a Martian came down to Earth and found a ruined civilization. Imagine it found target scores from the past century: In the 1865 the target had one bullet in the bullseye; in 1898 it had five bullets in the bullseye; in 1918 100 bullets in the bullseye. The extraterrestrial archaeologist would be baffled. The tests were supposed to measure the keenness of eyesight and whether the shooter has control over their weapon, and so on; how could human skill have advanced so quickly in such a short amount of time? But of course we know the answer: We had muskets at the time of the Civil War, repeating rifles by the Spanish-American War and machine guns by World War I. It was the equipment in the hands of the average soldier that was responsible, not better eyes or steadiness of hand.

So what mental artillery have we picked up over the last 100 years? Alexander Luria studied neuropsychology in the early half of the century, and he found that people were resistent to classification, to deducing the hypothetical. His subjects simply couldn’t think about anything abstract. Consider this exchange:

Luria: What do crows and fish have in common?
Subject: Absolutely nothing. A fish swims, and a crow flies.
Luria: Are they not both animals?
Subject: Of course not, a fish is a fish, and a crow is a bird.

The man could only think of the objects as how he might use them, not as abstract objects part of a classification system.

Luria told another subject: “There are no camels in Germany. Hamburg is in Germany. Are there camels in Hamburg?” The subject replied, “If it’s big enough, perhaps it has camels.” Luria prompted him again to listen to the conditions, and again he replied that perhaps Hamburg had camels. He was used to camels, and he was unable to imagine that there weren’t any in Hamburg.

How have we come to solve things that aren’t real problems? For one thing, education has changed dramatically. These days the majority of Americans get a high school degree. We’ve gone from four to eight years of formal education to twelve. Fifty-two percent of Americans get some tertiary education. In 1910 a state examination in Ohio given to 14-year-olds asked socially-valued concrete questions, like “What are the capitals of the 45 American states?” In 1990 such a state examination was about abstractions, asking instead: “Why is the largest city of the state rarely a capital?” And the student is supposed to reason that the state legislature is rural controlled and they hated Big City, and so on. Today we educate people to use abstractions and link them logically.

Another shift in the past century has been in employment. In the early 1900s, three percent of the population had cognitively demanding professions; today, it’s 35 percent. And not just professions like lawyer and doctor, sub-professions like technician and computer programmer are also cognitively demanding. Compare the banker in 1900, who really just needed a good accountant and to know who was trustworthy for paying back their mortgage. Today’s bankers, like the ones involved in the mortgage crisis, have jobs that demand much more from their cognitive faculties. It’s not just the spread of more cognitively demanding jobs but the upgrading of old professions.

Moral intelligence has escalated in the past century because we now take the universal seriously and are able to look for logical connections. In the 1950s and ’60s, people were coming home and talking to their parents about Martin Luther King, Jr. When they asked the generation before them, “How would you feel if you woke up tomorrow and you were black?” their parents responded, “That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Who have you known who has ever woken up black?” They were fixed in the concrete mores they had inherited, and they were unable to take the hypothetical seriously. As Flynn says, “Without the hypothetical, it’s very difficult to get moral argument off the ground.”

Looking at the evolution of IQ tests, it’s evident that gains have been greatest in certain areas, like classification and analogies. Consider the analogies in the Raven’s Progressive Matrices test:

In 1900 people could do simple analogies: Cat is to wildcat as dog is to … ? People answered wolf.
In 1960, two squares followed by a triangle is to two circles followed by a … ? People answered semi-circle.
And in 2010, two circles followed by a semi-circle is to two 16s followed by … ? An eight. People were even able to see beyond the symbol to abstract the concept of halving.

It’s not all good news, says Flynn. Our political intelligence is not improving. Studies show that American young people read less history and literature and less material about foreign places. It’s as if they are ahistoric, living in the present. How different might life be if Americans were more aware of their history, such as the fact that we have been lied to the past 4 out of 6 wars we’ve fought in? Lusitania was not an innocent ship with explosives on it, the North Vietnamese did not attack the Seventh Fleet, and Sadaam Husein hated Al Qaeda. Flynn remarks, “You can have humane moral principals, but if you’re ignorant of history and other cultures, you can’t do politics.”

But the 21st century has undoubtedly shown there are enormous cognitive reserves in orginary people, and they’re finally being tapped into. The aristocracy once was convinced that the average person would never make it, that they wouldn’t develop their cognitive abilities. But we know today that the average human is capable of much, much more.

But the real genius is Matt. He has so much creative intelligence, that we’re going to do some serious banking. Right, Matt?

This is the talk examined in today’s TED Weekends on the Huffington Post, exploring the idea of Creative IQ. Below, some of the TED Weekends essays that riff on this paradigm-shifting talk.

Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity?

I’ve spoken twice at TED. The first time was in 2006. TED was a very different event then. It was a private conference for about 1,200 people. After the event, the talks were packaged in a box set of DVDs and sent just to the attendees. I gave a talk called “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” A few months later, Chris Anderson, the curator of TED, called to say they were planning to put a few talks on their website as an experiment and asked if they could include mine. The timing was perfect. Social media was beginning to take shape and the insatiable appetite for YouTube and short videos was about to emerge. The experiment was an instant success and has turned TED into a global cultural phenomenon. There are now several hundred talks on the website and the number of downloads has passed one billion.

I’m surprised and delighted to say that my first talk remains the most viewed of all TEDTalks so far. It’s been downloaded well over 20 million times from all platforms in over 150 countries and continues to be downloaded about 10,000 times a day from the TED site alone. Admittedly that doesn’t compare with “Gangnam Style” with its 800 million downloads but it’s still a lot for a 20 minute talk on education …

In the past six years, I’ve had countless emails and tweets from young people who’ve shown it to their parents and teachers; from teachers, who’ve shown it to their students and their principals; from parents who’ve shared it with their kids, and from leaders who’ve shown it to their whole organizations. Why is this talk so popular and what’s the significance of its popularity?

There is so much to like about Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk that I hardly know where to start. That said, here is a single sentence from his talk that deserves affirmation and discussion:

“We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically,” Sir Ken points out while discussing different types of intelligence.

I give a particularly high value to kinesthetic thinking. As I have come to understand after teaching studio art for over 25 years, the connections between our minds, our senses and our physical bodies need to be constantly tested, developed and refreshed to help us reach our intellectual and creative potential.

As a painter and a painting teacher I am constantly impressed with the power of the kinesthetic learning that goes with art making. I also worry that this type of learning is being undermined by our increasing embrace of technology and electronic devices.

Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk on “Schools Killing Creativity” is enormously entertaining and so rousing that one feels sheepish about questioning any of its parts. Of course, he begins with the dual advantage of being very funny and very British, a combination that audiences in America, at least, tend to find irresistible.

He also operates on a level of generality that brooks almost no opposition. Who, after all, is against creativity? (Well, perhaps certain members of the United States Congress, but we will leave that for another column.) Who does not wish to see our children flourish? Who can resist a good joke at the expense of college professors, who make such delicious targets? His line about faculty members treating their bodies as vehicles to carry their heads from meeting to meeting is one that I can assure you I will steal.

When you hear the word “innovation,” an image may pop to mind of an intrepid inventor toiling in isolation — Benjamin Franklin flying his kite in a storm, or the Wright Brothers testing their flying machine on the beaches of Kitty Hawk. But during the first day of TEDGlobal 2012, speaker after speaker touted the tremendous leaps forward that can be made when we pool information, data, technology and insight over vast networks — and collectively share the task of creating and problem-solving. Almost all seemed to think that, when it comes to innovation, the more the merrier.

Digital visionary Don Tapscott (pictured above) kicked off the first session, “Critical Crossroads,” arguing that, since the time of the Gutenberg printing press, history has been moving toward shared intelligence. Giving recent examples ranging from business to the Arab Spring, Tapscott showed advances made by collectivity and pointed out ways that attempts to keep information and intellectual property private are being challenged. “This is not an information age, it’s an age of networked intelligence, an age of vast promise,” he said.

Tapscott found a beautiful analogy to highlight his point. “I’ve been studying nature recently. Bees come in swarms and fish come in schools, while starlings at night come together and create one of the most spectacular things in all of nature,” the astonishing starling murmuration, thousands of the birds dipping and diving together in a loose formation to protect themselves from predators. “There is leadership, but there is no leader. It’s an openness, a sharing of all kinds of information. I look at this thing and I get a lot of hope.”

Later in the first session, NATO Supreme Commander James Stavridis talked boldly about security in the 2st century, which he thinks will be best achieved by adopting an open-source model.

“Instead of building walls to create security, we need to build bridges,” he said. “Open-source security is about connecting the international, the interagency, the private and public — and lashing it together with strategic communication, largely in social networks. Open-source security is about connecting in ways that create longer lasting effect.”

In the second session of the day, “Tinker Maker Do,” the focus shifted from those who work in overarching systems to those who create something with their hands. Biologist Ellen Jorgensen sang the praises of do-it-yourself biotech labs, where anyone can have access to data and lab equipment.

She said, “You ask, ‘What would I do in a biotech lab?’ But it wasn’t long ago we were asking what would anyone do with a personal computer.”

Computing guru Massimo Banzi, the inventor of the Arduino, looked at the same effect with open-source hardware, sharing how, with simple microcontroller technology, users across the internet have shared plans for how to create, for example, a glove that translates sign language into words or a houseplant that tweets when it needs water.

Anti-poverty activist Jamie Drummond, the head of ONE.org, suggested that using group-think could also be valuable on a global political scale, revealing a plan to get mass participation in the setting of new worldwide Millennium Development Goals — targets set in the year 2000 to lower poverty and inequality and raise access to education worldwide by 2015. It’s likely these goals won’t be met by then, so “technocrats appointed by the UN and governments are busying themselves redesigning the goals, with the same 20th-century elite top-down closed process,” said Drummond. He would prefer that a global poll be taken on the issue, using the web and reality TV as information carriers.

In the final session of the day, “Building Blocks,” the focus shifted to education. Neuroscientist and artist Beau Lotto (watch his 2009 TEDTalk) shared his desire to open up scientific inquiry to a group not thought to have the intellectual rigor needed for it — children. Lotto showed how his students conducted an experiment to see if bees could problem-solve like humans. They wrote up their results in a proper scientific paper (though, yes, a scientific paper partially written in crayon) and — after two years of trying — it was published in a journal, and downloaded 30,000 times in its first day online.

“I learned that science isn’t just a boring subject,” said Amy O’Toole, age 12, one of the students who participated in the experiment (pictured below). “And that anyone can discover something new.”